Paranoia helps

This is a case, you might be paranoid, that does not mean that people are not out to hack your life. We seem to forget that, and the second part we forget is that big corporations do not care, it is the cost of doing business and that is what insurance is for. But the stage is growing and with full national 5G insurance companies will not take that stance, they would want assurances and that is when the consumer gets to pay for it all. One small slip up, one error and the consumer pays. That is where we are heading. 

This all started when I saw ‘Walmart ships fraudulent order to hacker’s address then leaves customer to recoup cost’ (at https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/walmart-fraudulent-order-online-account-hacked-1.6353016). The story gives us all kinds of information and in some cases the consumer made the easy choice, the ‘this is so much easier’ path and hackers tend to rely on that. But it is not all bad news (well mostly it is), so let’s start.

Item one ‘fraudsters were using it and his credit card on file’. This is with the consumer. Yes it is easy and most e-commerce sites use the same good encryption. Yet as I see it there are two issues. It is easy to order when the credit card is on file, so DO NOT DO THIS! Consider what you are doing every time you use your credit card. More important, when it is on file anything can happen as this consumer found out. I have two instances where a credit card is on file. One is a monthly payment of less than $10 a month, the other is even less. I enter my credit card information with every purchase. Commerce like people with credit cards on file, it is easier to make them buy, but consider that your budget is limiting and when you still have a week to go at the end of your credit card, life gets worse really fast.

Item two are two items, and they are on WalMart. We see ‘Walmart had cancelled the first three orders on its own, but Tomlinson noticed the last one for an Apple TV had just been shipped.’ In the first part why did three stop and one did not? If they are based on the same data, there is a flaw in the system, there is close to no other option. In addition we are given ‘he was not able to access the address and Walmart wouldn’t provide details’, this is clearly on Walmart. In addition, it should be in these systems that there is a permanent record of the last 10 addresses that are not linked to the credit card that paid for it, 10 is an arbitrary number, but it happens that a family member pays for another members item, or something like that. 

Now we get to the rather nasty stuff, we are given “In 2021, e-commerce retailers surveyed said they prevented about 4,860 attacks, but failed to stop about 4,800 others. The survey also suggests online and mobile fraud attacks on retailers appear to be rising since the pandemic started, up 45 per cent in Canada from 2020 to 2021.” In a full 5G network this number can go up by a 600% to 19500%, consider that 93,600 fraud cases are not stopped under 5G, do you really think that the insurances are going to sit back and let the numbers rise from 4,800 to 93,600? You have got to be kidding me and those who do will do so at horrendous premiums and the consumer gets passed on that bill. A setting I have foretold for years and people are still not waking up to Common Cyber Sense. Not all of it is the consumer. Yet look in your own home, how many use passwords like ‘QWERTY’, or something that simple? I thought I was clever in the 80’s when my password was ‘password’ and I learned quickly that there is more to safety and security. Then there are those who use the SAME password in all places and those people also have all their passwords on file. How long until deeper machine learning can make the jump from where we are, to what we are and how lazy we are? The algorithm is already out there, with 5G it gets the speed to really rake in the dollars. So whilst some might ry for big business when they give us “While Walmart says Tomlinson’s problem was caused by compromised credentials — not a cyber attack — Sutherland says companies across the board are dealing with such attacks on a regular basis.” And when we hear the sob story of covid made it worse, we need to consider that I saw issues like this in 2015, a massive overhaul of the e-commerce system is becoming essential and most of them do not want the cost, but the issue of fraud is happily passed on to the consumer. We need to accept that this is not merely Walmart, it hits e-commerce in Europe, US, and Asia. This is a much larger problem and a better system is required. Consider that we blame the NSO group for many hacks, but the basic issue is not merely the NSO group, they merely ‘Exploit Security Flaws in Phones’ Operating Systems’, so when this gets to e-commerce in the same way, we get a flaw exploiting a flaw and our goose is cooked. Hundreds of hackers hope to find that ‘Zero-Click’ flaw that makes the hacker rich whilst the hacker is sleeping and in a 5G world that will happen more often. It is not paranoia when they are all out to get your money, and there are many who want to do just that.